A short while ago, a screenwriter friend from Los Angeles called me. “I have three years left,” he said. “Maybe five if I’m lucky.” He had been allowed to test a screenplay AI still in development. He described a miniseries: main characters, plot and atmosphere – and a few minutes later, there they were, all the episodes, written and ready for filming. Then he asked the AI for improvement suggestions on its own series, and to his astonishment, they were great – smart, targeted, witty and creative. The AI completely overhauled the ending of one episode, and with those changes the whole thing was really good. He paused for a moment, then repeated that he had three years left before he would have to find a new job.

In 2020, I participated in an experiment that I gave a lecture on the following year, later published as a booklet titled My Algorithm and I. In it, I describe my failed collaboration with a large language model at a time when these AIs were not yet publicly available. If you want to understand AI better and analyse our current situation, please do not read my book. It has been so overtaken by technical development in the past three years that today it is so outdated it’s as though it came from a different period in world history, like a text about the first railways or a biplane airshow.

The AI back then was a stuttering, confused, downright pitiable entity – and that was just under four years ago. If development continues at this speed, which is unlikely because it will probably accelerate, we are facing something for which we have no adequate instinct. The proof is that we are not panicking. I’m not, and you probably aren’t either, but panic would be more appropriate than the calm with which we face the tsunami already visible on the horizon, or to quote the AI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner: “Right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people that have situational awareness.” One of them was the recently deceased Daniel Dennett, one of the most influential thinkers in the English-speaking world, co-creator of the modern philosophy of mind, who at an informal meeting of experts, where I, though not an expert, was allowed to be present, urged us all to do everything we could to warn decision makers.

However, I do not want to demonise the revolution we are experiencing. I believe nothing as fascinating has happened in the realm of the human mind in my lifetime.........

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